Oprah selection catapults debut novel

By Maggie Galehouse

Updated 8:40 pm, Sunday, December 23, 2012

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, by Ayana Mathis

Photo: Xx

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, by Ayana Mathis

Author Miah Arnold

Photo: Xx

Author Miah Arnold

US writer Ben Fountain, winner of the 2007 Pen Hemingway Prize with his novel "Brief Encounters with Che Guevara", poses during Etonnants Voyageurs film and book festival in Saint-Malo, western France, on May 11, 2008. This year marks the 19th year of the festival which takes place in Saint-Malo, western France from May 10 to May 12. AFP PHOTO FRED TANNEAU (Photo credit should read FRED TANNEAU/AFP/Getty Images)

On the streets of Philadelphia. During the 1990s, I taught Composition and Intro to Literature at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I was a graduate student in the English department. After two decades, I still remember the names of a handful of students who were avid readers and talented writers, whose faces lit up during class discussions.

I was an inexperienced teacher - a bundle of nerves, basically - but Mathis was a standout in the Intro to Lit class: smart, focused, one of two A's I gave that semester. One day, she challenged my close reading of a passage from "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and, long story short, she was right.

So when I saw her name on a new novel, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie," I flipped immediately to the back cover to look for a photo. Yep. Same Ayana Mathis.

It's awfully late in the year for a new book to generate much buzz, but that's precisely what's happening with Mathis' novel. Oprah Winfrey read it because of the title (her mother's name was Hattie Mae Lee) and pronounced it a pick for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.

That designation and a segment on NPR with Winfrey and Mathis have given this debut novel the sort of attention and affirmation authors dream about.

The story is anchored by Hattie, a woman who left her Georgia home in 1923 for the promise of a "New Jerusalem" in Philadelphia: "Hattie clambered from the train, her skirt still hemmed with Georgia mud, the dream of Philadelphia round as a marble in her mouth and the fear of it a needle in her chest."

The chapters focus on different descendants, or tribes, of Hattie. In essence, Mathis offers an intimate fictional look at the Great Migration, when African-Americans left Southern states by the millions to settle in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities.

I expect to see "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" on the New York Times best-seller list in the coming weeks - that's what happened with Cheryl Strayed's memoir, "Wild," after Winfrey chose it as the first pick of her 2.0 book club.

Good for you, Ayana Mathis. May you sell millions of books.

You owe me. "The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written or how much they want to live," writes Miah Arnold in "You Owe Me," an essay that appears in "The Best American Essays, 2012."

As part of her work with Writers in the Schools, a Houston nonprofit that sends professional writers into area classrooms, the local author spent 12 years teaching writing to "the sickest children in the world" at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. (Arnold still works for WITS but stopped teaching at M.D. Anderson last fall.) The title of her essay comes from a poem written by a "tiny, African-American boy from Houston" who died at age 9. It begins: "What thoughts I have of You tonight, God./ You protect me and You make giant waves/ and wash people away. You owe me."

Arnold worked with some of the children for several years. Most of them died. But the job gave as much as it took: "… the reason I have worked so long with children fighting cancer is that they have drawn me in, they have invited me, they have accepted me into their fierce and fragile worlds. I feel proud because they have. For some reason that I realize, finally, doesn't matter much at all, I stagger under the weight of the losses I have encountered with these children, but, miraculously, I haven't fallen."

A long walk. In Texas. New in paperback is "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," Ben Fountain's gutsy book about a squad of war heroes on a media tour to drum up support for the Iraq War. The squad spends Thanksgiving Day with the Dallas Cowboys and, for Spc. Billy Lynn - homesick, heartsick and, at one point, drunk and brawling - it becomes a gut-wrenching day of discovery.

Fountain is a Dallas author whose 2006 short-story collection, "Brief Encounters With Che Guevara," won national attention and literary awards. He earned a National Book Award nomination for "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" and was slated to appear in Houston earlier this month but had to cancel to attend the National Book Awards ceremony in the U.K.; he'd been nominated for "International Author of the Year." Fountain didn't win, but he did win PEN New England's Cerulli Award for Excellence in Sports Fiction and, just last week, the 2012 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction in New York.

Film rights for "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" have already been optioned by the Ink Factory, with Oscar-winning screenwriter Simon Beaufoy ("Slumdog Millionaire," "127 Hours," "The Full Monty") tapped to bring the story from the page to the screen.

Ghost hunter. With the holiday, there's only one author event this week. Author and professional psychic Victoria Laurie celebrates the release of her latest Ghost Hunter mystery, "What a Ghoul Wants," with a signing, discussion and intuitive readings for the crowd, 4 p.m. Saturday at Murder By The Book, 2342 Bissonnet. Details at 713-524-8597 or murderbooks.com.